Thursday, January 9, 2014

Magazine parodies / part one

Magazine parodies are a popular editorial feature of humor publications but it's only in the last thirty years or so that standalone titles have hit the newsstands.  The exception to this are the parodies from the Harvard Lampoon who have been doing it for years, their first New Yorker came out in 1939 (I've twelve of their titles from 1966 onwards for the second part of this post).  Satires of consumer magazines has been an editorial staple of the National Lampoon and college magazines, the College parodies paperback (published by Ballentine in 1961) featured seventeen magazines with various degrees of success in copying the originals but they were part of each issue rather than individual titles. 
     I collected the issues below over the years and they vary enormously in quality.  Some are near enough exact copies of the real thing while others are pretty hopeless quickies and probably vanished from the newsstands quick enough. As all magazines have advertising should a parody issue have real ones or made up versions of popular ads?  The best ones below made up fake ads that relate to the magazine's title. 
    Some (classed as books) are still available from Amazon.  The odd one out is Snooze, published as a paperback (Workman Publishing, 1986) a very funny parody of the New Yorker with articles and some brilliant cartoons.




1982

1983
1983

1983

1984

1984

1985

1985

1985

1986

1986

1987

1987

1987

1988

1988

1989

1991

1991

1994

1996

1996

1997

2001

2003

2008



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